Pygmalion and prometheus 125
“Promethean heat,” in the form of electricity, animates the monster
created from grafted parts of pillaged corpses in the sensational scene in
the iconic 1931 film Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff, which was based
on the celebrated novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Written in 1816
and published in 1818, Shelley’s story was strongly shaped by classical
mythology. Her father, William Godwin, wrote a commentary on seekers
of artificial life in antiquity, including the witches Medea and Erichtho
and the artisans Daedalus and Prometheus. Mary’s companions Percy
Shelley and Lord Byron were writing poems about Prometheus at the
time. In the novel, Mary Shelley conceived of her scientific genius Victor
Frankenstein as a Promethean “fire- bringer” for her era. She also drew
on exciting scientific and pseudoscientific ideas about alchemy, occult
transference of souls, chemistry, electricity, and human physiology cur-
rent in her day. 39
Some scholars suggest that Mary Shelley was influenced by reports of
macabre dissection experiments carried out by the notorious alchemist
Johann Dippel (b. 1673) of Frankenstein Castle, near the villa on Lake
Geneva where she wrote the story. Debates over the electrostimulation
work of Luigi Galvani and others were also much in the public eye by
the 1790s. Shelley was certainly aware of morbid experiments in which
animal and human corpses were grotesquely “reanimated” with electric-
ity. A public demonstration of galvanism on the twitching cadaver of an
executed criminal, for example, was staged in London in 1803. The life-
giving principle was left vague in her 1818 novel, but Shelley does mention
galvanism in her revised 1831 edition. She drew her subtitle, The Modern
Prometheus, from the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s famous essay (1756)
warning about the overweening “unbridled curiosity” exemplified by
Benjamin Franklin’s “discovery” of electricity. 40
Shelley tells how the young scientist Victor Frankenstein devotes two
years of painstaking work to building an artificial, intelligent android. He
assembles the creature part by part using raw materials from slaughter-
houses and medical dissections. In light of Shelley’s story of a “modern
Prometheus,” the ancient Etruscan illustrations, on gems, of Prometheus
putting together human body parts and skeletons seem to take on an eerie
prescience. In fact, the engravings of the Carafa gems in figures 6.5 and
6.6 were published in 1778. Several of the intaglios showing Prometheus
working on the unfinished torsos and assembling skeletons were included